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Congressman Dave Brat Skips Gun Violence Town Hall, Disappoints Students

David Streever | April 10, 2018

Topics: abigail spanberger, dan ward, Dave Brat, gun control, March For Our Lives, Parkland Students, schuyler vanvalkenburg, Town halls

On what’s normally a vacation week, four local high school students were hard at work organizing Town Hall for our Lives meetings around the area. The meetings, inspired by the Parkland student movement, are opportunities for students to talk to their elected officials about gun control and gun violence.

Chaz Nuttycombe, a senior at Hanover High School, put together the most recent event this past Saturday at Libbie Mill Library in Henrico, part of Congressman Dave Brat’s 7th Congressional District. He invited Brat, but the congressman declined to attend via an email sent to one of Nuttycombe’s co-organizers. “It looked like a form email,” he said, describing the email as one that characterized past town halls as rude and disrespectful.

“I was willing to work with him to make sure it would be a civil event,” Nuttycombe said. He even went to Brat’s D.C. office to invite him in person, an experience he described as disappointing. “I went to his office, I was polite. His staff was friendly, but it was clear from the looks on their faces that he wouldn’t attend.”

A seat was saved for Brat between challengers Spanberger, Ward

After Brat declined, Nuttycombe invited the Democratic challengers, former CIA operative Abigail Spanberger and 25-year Marine veteran Dan Ward. “That’s the etiquette. You invite your representative and if they decline you invite the competition,” he said. Both accepted his invitation, joining the 80 or so people in attendance.

Ward described the focus on school safety and gun control as central to his campaign. “We were the first to back the assault weapon ban,” he said. Ward said he’s running to address shortcomings in political leadership, adding,“We’ve abdicated our responsibility as the government to the NRA, and it’s been disastrous.”

He characterized Brat’s tenure in office as symptomatic of what he called a bigger problem; representatives who worry more about re-election than about serving constituents. “Everyone is taking the political temperature on issues that are clearly right or wrong, and we need people of courage to take the moral positions,” he said.

Reached by phone, Spanberger was full of praise for the students, and said it was an easy decision to attend their town hall. “Absolutely. It’s incredible how engaged and involved these local students are, I’m happy to be part of anything they are putting together.” She described the students as polite, mature, and “impressively well-organized.”

Both of the candidates thought Brat should have been in attendance, and pointed to what Ward called a pattern of not showing up. “That’s who he is. It’s his biggest problem, that he doesn’t come out and talk to his constituents.”

Spanberger said the problem was bigger than this meeting, but thought the absence was especially notable. “Of all the events that he hasn’t attended and all of the times he hasn’t made himself available, I think this one was particularly disappointing,” she said, noting that Brat hasn’t held a town hall since last spring.

While school safety was the focus, Nuttycombe also asked the candidates to sign a pledge to hold at least four town hall meetings a year. Both signed.

“We’ve done 79 meet and greets in the last nine months. Four town halls sounds easy,” Spanberger said about the request, before adding in a more sober tone, “I think it’s only fair to make sure that we’re accessible to every county in the district.”

Also in attendance was Del. Schuyler VanValkenburg, a high school teacher first elected to represent the 72nd district this past November. “I think it’s important to show them support, and I agree with their cause,” he said about attending the meeting.

He said the meeting was important, but stressed that elected officials need to also work to address the more common incidents of gun violence across the nation instead of just the tragic outliers.

“My fear is that we get too narrow, we start talking about bulletproof glass and arming teachers,” he said, “but we should be looking at the front-end and asking how we can make our communities healthier and safer.”

Like Spanberger and Ward, VanValkenburg found the student work encouraging. “We’re already seeing a shift in the dialogue and the narrative, and the organizers should feel optimistic and motivated,” he said, adding, “But it is early days, people have to keep that momentum up.”

Asked to weigh-in on Brat’s absence, he described it as a missed opportunity for the congressman to hear from his constituents, adding, “Sometimes [town halls] can be unruly or unfriendly terrain, but as he noted when he ran against Eric Cantor, that’s part of your responsibility.”

RVA Mag tried to reach the congressman to ask him about his absence. As with the last time we reached out to his office, we received no answers to our specific questions, however, his communications director Mitchell Hailstone only provided what he called ‘background’ on Brat. The short response described him as a loving father who is concerned about school violence, and noted that he held “a roundtable discussion with school security officers, mental health experts, superintendents of schools, law enforcement officials and school board members,” which he noted was not covered in RVA Mag but in the Culpeper Star Exponent.

According to that newspaper, Brat proposed no specific legislation to address trauma, but was in favor of placing professional security at the front doors of schools and addressing mental health issues through a “holistic approach.”

Nuttycombe wasn’t surprised by Brat’s absence at the student-run event, he said, noting that he wrote two speeches; one for if Brat attended, and one for if he didn’t. He described the absence as proof that the congressman is out of touch with voters, saying, “He’s still voting like the tea party insurgent he ran as when he beat Cantor, and he hasn’t realized that the district has become more moderate. His constituents want sensible regulations on gun ownership, not someone who takes big donations from the NRA.”

Despite the lack of support from the district congressman, Nuttycombe is moving forward with his work. His next step is a town hall with Rep. Donald McEachin and Sen. Tim Kaine on Apr 21 at the Adult Alternative Program, an ex-offender re-entry program in Richmond, and a major rally the day before on Brown’s Island connected to the national walkout starting at 12 AM.

The rally will take place at noon with music, speeches, and a march to the State Capitol where Gov. Ralph Northam will speak following student leaders speeches from the steps of the state building.

Virginia Republican Forum Equates Gun Debate Led by Parkland Student Survivors to the Holocaust  

Landon Shroder | April 1, 2018

Topics: Gun Control Debate, Holocaust, Jews, Parkland Students, Republican Party, virginia, Virginia Beach

On Passover weekend, one of the most observed holy days for Jewish people celebrating the biblical end of slavery in Egypt, a Virginia Beach (VB) Republican forum made a Facebook post equating the gun control debate led by survivors of the Parkland school shooting to the holocaust – a genocide that claimed an estimated 6 million Jewish lives during WW2.

The post made on Saturday was accompanied by a picture from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum showing thousands of shoes from the victims of the gas chambers and read, “To all the kids that walked out of school to protest guns. These are the shoes of Jews that gave up there [sic] firearms to Hitler. They where [sic] led into gas chambers, murdered and buried in mass graves.” The post finished with, “Pick up a history book and study the US Constitution, and you’ll realize what happens when you give up freedoms and why we have them. Share if you agree.”

As of Sunday the post had been shared over 800 times by pro-gun advocates and has drawn widespread condemnation from the Jewish community and their allies in the Hampton Roads area, reflected in the comments section of the post.

One commentator, Amanda Mileur, summed up the post by saying, “This is revolting. To compare people who want gun control so that kids WON’T be murdered in schools to Nazis is bad enough.” She went on to comment, “But to blame Holocaust victims for their own deaths? To say they died because they allowed the government to take their guns? That is reprehensible, not to mention an inaccurate representation of gun laws under the Nazi regime. You should be ashamed. And so should every single person who supports this post.”

Another commentator, Oonagh Danaan condemned the appropriation of the Jewish experience during the holocaust to perpetuate “your scare tactics” and closed by observing that the Nazis gained power because of similar “propagandist tripes [sic]”. 

Equating stricter gun control laws to the Jewish experience during the holocaust is hardly a new strategy for Republican supporters of the Second Amendment. During the last presidential election, then-candidate Ben Carson also made a similar claim. In his book A More Perfect Union, he opined, “Through a combination of removing guns and disseminating deceitful propaganda, the Nazis were able to carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance.” And according to Politico, he also reiterated this point on the campaign trail multiple times. Donald Young, a Republican Congressman from Alaska, made this point in February when he said, “How many Jews were put in the ovens because they were unarmed?” Young is also a member of the NRA board.

None of these claims actually hold up to basic historical scrutiny. They remain more about the ideological need for pro-gun advocates to justify their intractable positions as opposed to an accurate assessment of the conditions that led to the holocaust in Nazi Germany.

Despite the misleading claims, the majority of Jews who died in the holocaust were not German citizens, but citizens of the countries the Nazis invaded and occupied. The most basic historical understanding of WW2 would point to the fact that if the armies of those countries could not protect their own citizenry their Jewish minority stood little chance of escaping Nazi terrors – armed or not. None of which takes into account that Jewish partisans, including those who rebelled in the Warsaw Ghetto, fought fiercely against Nazi aggression throughout the war years (using guns) and this still did not end the industrial genocide of European Jewry.

Poster Commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

RVA Mag reached out to the Republican Party in VB about this post and received this statement from Tina Mapes, the chairwoman of the party, “The VB Republicans page is not an official page of the committee and does not reflect the views of the official party in Virginia Beach. I frequently post reminders of that and did so as recently as last week. I do not condone such inflammatory posts nor do we make endorsements of candidates prior to primaries/official nominating proceedings.”

After this inquiry, they informed RV Mag that they updated their Facebook page to reflect this statement.

While the Virginia Beach Republicans FB page is not the official page of the Republican Party in VB, the messaging tactic of some elements of the conservative base have fully adopted this messaging narrative. So much so that the Anti-Defamation League as far back as in 2013 had this to say about the comparison in a press release, “Concerned over the proliferation of remarks comparing gun control legislation in the United States to policies upheld by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today called on critics of gun control legislation to stop using references to Hitler and the Nazis, saying they are ‘historically inaccurate and offensive,’ especially to Holocaust survivors and their families.” In the press release, they cited multiple examples of conservative Republicans using this rationale including writers from the Drudge Report, Fox News, and Judge Andrew Napolitano.

Joash Schulman, a Jewish lawyer and businessman in VB who reached out to RVA Mag echoed the ADL’s concerns. Speaking about the Virginia Beach Republican’s post-Schulman said, “Not only is the post incredibly offensive and inaccurate, it’s just one example of how dangerous and deceptive the messaging tactics have become from the fringes of the Republican Party.” He finished by expressing indignation that a political party would use an image depicting the holocaust to “advance a completely irrelevant political agenda” and that it was troubling that the Republican Party is willing to give political top cover to those who would spread “falsehoods and half-truths”.

*As of Sunday evening the FB page from Virginia Beach Republicans has been taken down. 

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